The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, and James Talleyco is going to start right now.

Hey, Lawrence.

Hey, Jed, you got it right. We do have James Telerico joining us tonight. I want to give them as much time as we possibly can, given what happened to him last night. So we're going to get right to it. Sounds good. Have a good show. Thanks, Jen. Thank you. And so for the first time ever, our first guest tonight was banned on television last night.

Stephen Colbert. Thanks, Jen. Thank you. And so for the first time ever, our first guest tonight was banned on television last night.

Stephen Colbert's most popular guest of the year so far is not a movie star. He's someone most Americans have never heard of until CBS decided that their viewers should not hear from him last night on Stephen Colbert's

program. In 2006, Stephen Colbert started using the phrase the Colbert bump to describe the

surge in popularity that could happen for someone just by being on TV with Stephen. A surge in book

sales, or in the case of politicians, a bump up in the polls,

and now the Colbert bump has taken on new meaning. And we hear at the last word, stand ready,

to accept any guest on this program after that guest is bumped out of Stephen Colbert's show

by cowardly corporate lawyers. Last night, when I watched Stephen Colbert tell the story of what happened at his show yesterday,

I thought, let's get James Telerico on this show tonight.

You know, who is not one of my guests tonight?

That's Texas State Representative James Tala Rico.

He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network's lawyers,

who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast.

Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on,

I could not mention me not having him on.

And because my network clearly doesn't want us to talk about this, let's talk about this.

You've probably heard.

So you might have heard of this thing called the equal time rule, okay?

It's an old FCC rule that applies only to radio and broadcast television, not cable or streaming, that says if a show has a candidate on during an election, they have to have all that candidate's opponents on as well.

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